The officers have accused, P Kotiah, who till recently was the chairman of Nabard, of sabotaging the scheme of integration between the general service and the technical service categories. According to the technical officers, Kotiah did this as he himself belonged to the general service catergory. Nabard has been lying headless after Kotiah retired last year with posts of five other professional directors also lying vacant. According to the technical officers, Kotiah issued a circular, which stated that pending a decision on intergration, promotions in different grades would be according to the rules. "He did this despite knowing the rule was discriminatory," a source said.

The bank's major services are general and economic with a few on thetechnical side. According to technical officers, only the general (rural developement banking) service, which are in majority (around 3,000) constitute the bank's administrative authority and are responsible to implement the board's decisions.

They state that the batches recruited in 1988 and later, continued to occupy the present top posts of general managers since 1993. They added that the same officers as chief general managers since 1997, were aspiring to become executive directors. This has been done while sidelining the seniors in the 1986 batch of the same grade in technical service.

Technical officers in Nabard have moved court praying that the bank's action in promoting only general service officers despite assigning general work to technical service, the switch-over option given to economic service, partial integration of technical service in Grade A and B, and maintaining discipline wise seniority in grades C,D and E in technical service, are discriminatory and violate the Articles 14 and 16 ofthe Constitution of India.

The officers have further added that the court may direct Nabard to promote officers in technical service from the date when their counterpart juniors in general service got promotion. According to technical officers, the staff rule is such that a technical officer even with a CAIIB and prior rural banking experience, cannot be considered for the vacancies arising in rural development banking service and consequently, they cannot be eligible for the posts of DGM, GM, CGM under the general system. This, ruled out any chance of them becoming a ED or MD of Nabard.